


Warlock A. C. Damien Dowling - On given names

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, I love him, and he deserves to get a reunion goddamnit, hi i have Feelings about Warlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 08:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20111782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: The fourth name Warlock acquired, aged five and wide eyed and with a hiss in his ears, was dear damnable child. His nanny had crouched down in front of him, with her lips painted red and her hands thin and bony against his cheek. She’d looked at him from behind her sunglasses and she’d smiled in a way that showed her teeth and curled her lips. Warlock beamed at her.or:Warlock Asmodeus Cain Damien Dowling goes through nicknames over the course of his life.





	Warlock A. C. Damien Dowling - On given names

Warlock Damien Dowling had, without a doubt, the worst name in existence. Well, second worst, really – his mother could have made up her mind about trying to name him something unspeakable just to spite his father who had left her alone to give birth in some remote little nunnery, hanging up the phone at her. Harriet Dowling could have, had she been even a touch less upset, or had her husband been a touch less absent during their marriage, named her child Thaddeus, after his dad and his dad’s dad.

She didn’t. Instead she took every name the nuns threw at her and gave it to him: The baby was christened Warlock Asmodeus Cain Damien Dowling, who had picked his two favourites out of his first names, for convenience and simplicity’s sake, and now went by Warlock Damien Dowling. [1] The worst name in existence, really, in his humble opinion – he’d gone through no less than fifteen nicknames in the last twenty-one years, and none of them sounded quite right.

There was of course, for simplicity, and laziness, simply Warlock, without any second names, but that didn’t remove the fact that _Warlock_ was a truly horrid thing to pronounce for any child, American diplomat’s children not excepted, and so he’d often end up swallowing the complicated combined rl. [2] Then there was the case of Warlock’s mother, who often shortened his name to _Lockie_ or _Lock_, particularly when she thought he was particularly cute. She called him Warlock more and more as he grew into his eyes and was no longer small enough to cradle in her arms. [3]

Warlock’s father, in contrast, called him _son_, or, if he called him by a name at all, _Damien_, which, according to him, was the only sensible name his mother had picked.

The fourth name Warlock acquired, aged five and wide eyed and with a hiss in his ears, was _dear damnable child_. His nanny had crouched down in front of him, with her lips painted red and her hands thin and bony against his cheek. She’d looked at him from behind her sunglasses and she’d smiled in a way that showed her teeth and curled her lips. Warlock beamed at her.

The gardener his parents employed when he was still too small to peek over the garden hedges called him _young master_, with the sort of voice Warlock only ever heard his mother use when she took him to the museum on her day off, her hair on her shoulders, and told him everything about every painting, every skeleton, every stone they passed. Her voice was quiet, then, and almost choked, as if there was something heavy resting on top of it. [4] And so Warlock smiled at him, too, and listened to him talk about _goodness_ and _light _and _forgiveness_ the way Nanny talked about _questions_ and _knowledge _and _defiance_. It would occur to him, some years later as he laid in his dorm bed with heavy eyes and a textbook on his chest, that this was unusual not just because the gardener never seemed to do actual gardening.

(A side note, before Warlock can continue thinking about his name:

Sometimes, he misses his Nanny so much he can hardly breathe. Sometimes, he wakes up with the smell of sulphur and herbs in his nose and a lullaby on his mind that he never forgot, the rough tilt of her voice as she sang to him and all but hissed out her words. Sometimes, he looks at himself in the mirror and sees her in the way he holds his hands, in his eyes and the curl of his mouth, sometimes he looks at himself and wonders if she would still call him _dear_, even now that he doesn’t lead legions of the damned, even now that he barely sleeps in between class and assignments, and most decidedly does not _get enough sleep so you can one day rise and crush them all under your boot, my dear_.[5] Sometimes, his accent shifts away from what he has carefully crafted it into, a mirror of his father’s, an echo of his mother’s. Sometimes, all he wants is for her to hug him – all bony arms and soft red hair – and never let him go.)

There were, of course, various nicknames Warlock had been given (and, naturally, given himself) over the course of his school years, most notably the semester during which he’d insisted everyone call him _War_. Nanny had clicked her tongue and obliged, but she’d tilted his chin and smiled at him like she always did before leaning in and hissing things his parents could not hear.[6] “You don’t much look like her”, she’d said and cocked an eyebrow. “Although there is something to be said for the similarity in your jawlines, I suppose. Of course, you are much too young to determine that for sure.”[7] She called him War for two years until he had decided on a new name.

When Warlock turned ten, his mother took him to a museum he’d never been in before, and they spent five hours admiring rocks and gems and the way their colour shifted with the light. Warlock, with his eyes as big as they could be, drank up every word his mother told him, every description he could read, and when they reached the gems, laid out against white fabric, Harriet Dowling could barely pull her child away from it all. That evening, Warlock marched into the garden and let himself fall onto the swing the gardener had tied to the low branches of the old oak tree, and spun himself around on top of it.

“I’ve decided”, he’d said and tried to mimic his father’s tone of voice when he had something particularly important to say, “that from now on, you ought to call me Beryl.”[8] The gardener had just smiled and shown him the storks nesting atop a nearby chimney. “Look, Master Beryl”, he’d said. “Theres brother and sister stork.” Beryl really was a much nicer name than Warlock. Or Asmodeus. Or Cain. Or Damien, even.

When Nanny left and took the gardener and all the warmth with her, Warlock refused to leave his room for a week, like maybe, if he just stayed buried in between his blankets long enough, she’d come back, click her tongue and tell him to go down into the garden for some fresh air. She didn’t. Instead, Harriet Dowling sat down next to him and called him by his full legal name, told him he was too old now for a Nanny to fuss over him day in and day out. It sounds like his father has borrowed her voice and her face, taking his Nanny from him without even bothering to show up himself.

That’s when Warlock understood, suddenly and clearly, why his mother, exhausted and surrounded by strangers and a black screen, had given him his names. Fuck you, his names said, in a many voiced choir, the way Nanny’s voice would sometimes sound, late at night when she got tired and Warlock was all but asleep. Fuck you, Thaddeus Dowling, this child is not jelly pressed into the shape of you, fuck you and the way you are like smoke, like fog sitting heavy on our tongues.

_Fuck you for taking Nanny from me._

And so he went by his full name. _Warlock Asmodeus Cain Damien Dowling_ he wrote on every single piece of homework, on every book, signed every document with it, and watched as the names taunted his father, even when he went off to university, even when Thaddeus Dowling didn’t bother calling him anything but _Damien_, when he could see the curl of his lips as if he’d eaten something sour; or spoiled.

When he is twenty one and overworked, sleep deprived and has spilled coffee over his new shirt, Warlock Asmodeus Cain Damien Dowling runs into his Nanny. Admittedly, she looks different than he can remember her – black jeans and a loose tie, her hair shorter than his own, but her voice still has that hissing tilt, she still wears her glasses, and there’s still something about the way she moves that makes him think of a snake, somehow.

Naturally, he drops his takeout and throws his arms around her, his eyes burning. And naturally, her bony arms are around him, the way they’ve always been, and she sways him gently, a hand in his hair.[9]

[1] Of course there was no real holy water involved in the christening of what was believed to be the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this world, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. It had been swapped with regular water by an angelic miracle, undocumented to the forces of Heaven. Naturally.

[2] A fancy that infected all the staff employed by Mr and Mrs Dowling, provided they had a soft spot for little boys who throw baby food at walls and then proceed to present it like an art piece, pointing to themselves by proudly shouting out their names. About half the staff did not. Most notably, the cleaners had little to like about the permanent marker Warlock tended to favour when decorating the walls.

[3] Warlock, aged five and very decisive, had stomped his foot on the nice carpet in the living room that Harriet kept forgetting to remove from the floor so it didn’t fall prey to a temper tantrum, and had told her in his little voice that he was too big to be called Lockie, now. So Harriet, who didn’t know that he’d changed his mind approximately ten minutes later, stopped using it, and never asked him what he’d like to be called. She still calls him by his full first name.

[4] He would later learn that this heaviness, this quiet in his mother’s gaze and in the gardener’s voice, was called _reverence_ and that people often used it when faced with something unspeakable, something old and awe inspiring. “When you grow up all the world will look at you like that”, Nanny says and kisses his forehead, “you will make them tremble with it.”

[5] In a bookshop in Soho, a demon currently crammed into the body of a snake, who is sunning himself in a spot well observable by potential clients, thinks of the boy he raised, and wonders the same.

[6] This is, of course, how Crowley Tempts. He is the voice in your ears, the itching under your skin, the way your mouth goes dry and your stomach turns just before you decide to do something. It is, in a lot of ways, the gentlest and most effective way to perform a Temptation, and Crowley has received many a commendation for it.

[7] Warlock Asmodeus Cain Damien Dowling never met War, because she was still too weak to meet anyone, really, but some time in the future, War will meet a boy – a man, really, but she is too old to bother with such distinctions – who shares the sharpness of her jaw, and the edge of her smile in a way that all but drips of demonic conviction. She tries to engage in small talk with him, but the boy looks her over twice, smiles, and ducks through a doorway. Curious.

[8] He didn’t quite succeed in capturing the tone of his father’s voice, as is to be expected when a ten year old whose political education comes from a demon who isn’t all that well versed in American politics, tries to imitate an ambassador coming up with excuses so he doesn’t have to come home for dinner.

[9] It’s good takeout, too, and in five minutes Crowley will miracle it intact. It would be a shame to waste such perfectly unhealthy food, after all.


End file.
